AURORA | Police last week released composite pictures of a suspect in the 1984 slayings of three members of the Bennett family — one of the city’s most brutal and notorious cold cases.
The first shows the man 25 years ago; the second, today.
Aurora police said in a statement they worked with Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Virginia. Police said the company specializes in DNA phenotyping, a process of predicting physical appearance and ancestry from unidentified DNA evidence.
The pictures, which police said are based on predictions about ancestry, eye color, hair color, skin color, freckling and face shape, show what the suspect would have looked like when he was 25-years-old in 1984, and what he could look like today.
Ellen Greytak, director of bioinformatics at Parabon, said the technology has only been around since late 2014.
“It’s a very new technology,” she said.
Working only from the DNA evidence that investigators found, Greytak said scientists at Parabon are able to develop a picture of what the suspect may have looked like.
“It’s not intended to be a drivers license photo, it’s not intended to be a perfect likeness of that person,” she said.
Instead, Greytak said the images can help investigators rule out some suspects. And, hopefully, someone sees the images and says the picture looks somewhat like a person they know, perhaps providing the break investigators need.
Police say that in 1984, between 9 p.m. Jan. 15 and 10 a.m. Jan. 16, 27-year-old Bruce Bennett, his wife, Debra, 26, and their 7-year-old daughter, Melissa, were slain inside their home on the 16300 Block of East Center Drive. An autopsy found that Debra died from blunt force trauma. Additionally, autopsies determined that Bruce and Melissa died from blunt force trauma as well as sharp force injuries, consistent with a knife. Police said Melissa had been sexually assaulted.
A second child, the Bennetts’ 3-year-old daughter, was also attacked, but survived her injuries.
Police have said a hammer was likely used in the attack on the Bennetts.
In 2010 police said DNA at the scene linked the attack to a similar hammer attack that killed a Lakewood woman a few days prior to the Bennett slayings.
Police are asking anyone with information on the case to contact Aurora police Detective Steve Conner with the Homicide Unit Cold Case Squad at 303-739-6190 or by e-mail at swconner@auroragov.org.